Birthday Letters | Ted Hughes

Title: Birthday Letters

Author: Ted Hughes

One would expect a book of poetry largely written about a person's former wife, the mother of his children, to be more personal. This book is devoid of any emotion. I would even venture to say that it is boring. There are no major revelations in this collection, no real displays of affection. He surely loved her once, right? What this feels like to me is a gross capitalization off a famous suicide, the sole purpose being to gain some more fame of his own. It's disgusting. Down to the references to Plath's most famous work (e.g., "Daddy"), I just can't seem to find any redeeming qualities in Hughes's collection here.

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QUOTES

The dreamer in her

Had fallen in love with me and she did not know it.

That moment the dreamer in me

Fell in love with her and I knew it.

----

I had let it all grow. I had supposed

It was all OK. Your life

Was a liner I voyaged in.

Costly education had fitted you out.

Financiers and committees and consultants

Effaced themselves in the gleam of your finish.

You trembled with the knew life of those engines.

That first morning,

Before your first class at College, you sat there

Sipping coffee. Now I know, as I did not,

What eyes waited at the back of the class

To check your first professional performance

Against their expectations. What assessors

Waited to see you justify the cost

And redeem their gamble. What a furnace

Of eyes waited to prove your metal. I watched

The strange dummy stiffness, the misery,

Of your blue flannel suit, its straitjacket, ugly

Half-approximation to your idea

Of the properties you hoped to ease into,

And your horror in it. And the tanned

Almost green undertinge of your face

Shrunk to its wick, your scar lumpish, your plaited

Head pathetically tiny.

You waited,

Knowing yourself helpless in the tweezers

Of the life that judges you, and I saw

The flayed nerve, the unhealable face-wound

Which was all you had for courage.

I saw that what you gripped, as you sipped,

Were terrors that killed you once already.

Now I see, I saw, sitting, the lonely

Girl who was going to die.

That blue suit.

A mad, execution uniform,

Survived your sentence. But then I sat, stilled,

Unable to fathom what stilled you

As I looked at you, as I am stilled

Permanently now, permanently

Bending so briefly at your open coffin.

----

You were overloaded. I said nothing.

I said nothing. The stone man made soup.

The burning woman drank it.

----

And you will never know what a battle

I fought to keep the meaning of my words

Solid with the world we were making.

----

And as if reporting some felony to the police they let you know you were not John Donne.

----

We were where we had never been in our lives.

Visitors--visiting even ourselves.

The bats were part of the sun's machinery,

Connected to the machinery of the flowers

By the machinery of insects. The bats' meaning

Oiled the unfailing logic of the earth.

Cosmic requirement--on the wings of a goblin.

A rebuke to our flutter of half-participation...

Those bats had their eyes open. Unlike us,

They knew how, and when, to detach themselves

From the love that moves the sun and other stars.

----

Your journal pages. Your effort to cry words.

----

And as it grew up and began to enjoy itself

What would we do with an unpredictable,

Powerful, bounding fox?

That long-mouthed, flashing temperament?

That necessary nightly twenty miles

And that vast hunger for everything beyond us?

How would we cope with its cosmic derangements

Whenever we moved?

...If I had grasped that whatever comes with a fox

Is what tests a marriage and proves it a marriage--

I would not have failed the test.

----

But red

Was what you wrapped around you.

Blood red.

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READING PROGRESS:

The Green Mile by Stephen King: 58%

Last Day by Luanne Rice: 69%

The Valley of Amazement by Amy Tan: 30%

Rise of the Rebels by Michael Kogge: NOW STARTING